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5 Ways to Kill a Man

September 20, 2011

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I have mentioned in a post earlier this week that I am not a big fan of poetry but of-course I have a few poems here and there that I appreciate. One of which is called “Five Ways to Kill a Man” by Edwin Brock. The title is self explanatory, as the poem lays out five ways to kill a man.

In a nutshell without reciting the poem’s first stanza (A group of lines forming the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem) is about Jesus Christ. The second one talks about the Medieval European warfare and the third word refers to World War I which automatically continues to go the the fourth stanza about World War II to discuss “Hiroshima and Nagasaki”. For those of you who aren’t interested in poetry and literature the five verses are structured in a way that consist of constituent elements that tell a story of a period of time of how human beings are brutally killed by each other.

The fifth and last stanza of five ways to kill a man is what strikes me most. It says:

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.

Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see

that he is living somewhere in the middle

of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Which bring me to think…. if the poem was written back in 1963 how did the poet know that life in the 20th century would be enough to kill a man?

Living in the 20th century doesn’t doom one to death but then again, we do live in times that are cruel and it gets harder everyday. There are children starving to death in Somilia, Global warming, nuclear threats, aids, weapons and pollution are all factors that are contributing in killing out human race, not as fast as one would think but slowly and painfully. To put a man in the middle of the 20th century is death sentence, we live in a time where no man can care about his fellow man, in a life where your friends are on Facebook, your communication is on Twitter, your conversations are over Skype and your email is in your pocket through your smartphone. We live in a world where our social life has become so digital that real life doesn’t taste the same anymore, emotions are numbed and one thinks of no one but themselves.

The final stanza simply states that there is no need for a planned and complicate plan that society will eventually kill man, that with time the world will eventually self-destruct.